Zurich Book Fair and Serviceplan Suisse transformed five viral internet GIFs into hand-etched copperplate engravings to attract younger Swiss audiences in 2023.
ARCHIVEZurich Book Fair Turns Viral GIFs Into Copperplate Engravings
Zurich Book Fair's "Antique GIFs" campaign, created by Serviceplan Suisse and launched in Switzerland in February 2023, transformed five popular internet GIFs into hand-etched copperplate engravings to introduce antiquarian craftsmanship to a younger digital audience and reverse a long-running decline in younger visitor attendance.
The Zurich Book Fair, established in 1994 according to house-of-communication.com, holds the position of Switzerland's premier event for traders and collectors of rare antiquarian books and prints. The fair's core challenge was structural: its existing audience was ageing, and visitor numbers were shrinking in proportion. Reaching a generation raised on digital media required a creative bridge between the scrollable and the tangible — something that could speak the visual language of the internet while embodying the slowness and skill of analogue craftsmanship.
The campaign's central mechanism was both conceptually precise and practically audacious. Five internet GIFs — the looping, sequential video formats native to social platforms — were each translated into a series of eight hand-etched copper printing plates, mirroring the frame-by-frame structure of the digital format in an entirely analogue medium. A single print run then produced 48 unique prints from these plates. Those prints became the currency of an Instagram raffle: participants screenshotted and reposted a rolling "Antique GIF" for a chance to win a physical print of the exact frame they had captured. As reported by Little Black Book, the campaign generated online buzz that brought young visitors to the fair in record numbers, with winners collecting their prints on the fair floor itself — turning a social media moment into a physical footfall event in Switzerland.
ARCHIVEZurich Book Fair faced a generational audience gap that is not unique to Switzerland but is acutely felt in the niche antiquarian sector. The fair's visitors skewed older, its collector base was not renewing itself, and digital-first leisure habits were widening the distance between young Swiss consumers and the tactile pleasures of rare books and prints. The challenge for Serviceplan Suisse was not to modernise the fair's identity but to make its oldest qualities feel newly desirable to an audience that had never encountered copperplate engravings outside a museum.
The strategic insight underpinning "Antique GIFs" was a formal one: internet GIFs and copperplate printing share the same sequential logic. Both are built from discrete still frames that, taken together, suggest movement. By mapping one format onto the other, Serviceplan Suisse gave digital natives an intuitive point of entry into a centuries-old craft. The campaign did not ask young people to abandon their screens — it used the screen as a recruitment mechanism, staging the raffle entirely on Instagram and rewarding participation with a physical object that could only be collected in person.
According to ilab.org, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers reported in October 2023 that the Zurich Fair replaced its printed catalogue with an online platform and received support from the Swiss Bibliophiles Association — signalling a broader institutional shift toward digital engagement within the antiquarian sector in Switzerland. The global rare-book market was estimated at approximately US$560 million in 2023, according to marketintelo.com, reflecting a specialist audience with real spending power but limited mass-market visibility. In that context, campaigns capable of generating organic social reach — as "Antique GIFs" did against competitors such as the Vienna Antiquarian Book Fair and the London International Antiquarian Book Fair, both of which rely primarily on traditional collector outreach — represent a meaningful strategic differentiator.
Mathias Gentinetta executed the copperplate engraving work at the heart of "Antique GIFs." Known for his contemporary approach to the centuries-old craft and operating under the studio identity Kupfer Werkstatt, Gentinetta hand-etched each of the forty copper printing plates required to render five GIFs across their eight-frame sequences. The discipline of copperplate printing — in which an image is incised into a metal surface, inked, and pressed onto paper — demands both technical precision and an acceptance of variation that digital production eliminates entirely. Each of the 48 prints produced in the single print run is therefore unique, carrying the micro-variations of the hand-made object.
The creative team at Serviceplan Suisse brought considerable depth to the project. Chief Creative Officer Raul Serrat and Executive Creative Director Marcin Baba oversaw the campaign, with Creative Director Thomas Lüber leading the concept. Copywriters Günter Zumbach and Peter Liptak shaped the campaign's voice, while graphic designers Carina Kienzle and Govinda Schmidt handled visual execution. The photographic and moving-image documentation of the work — including the animated presentation of the "Antique GIFs" themselves — was directed, shot, and edited by Dominic Shota Schweingruber, who also handled animation and post-production, with photography credited additionally to Joss Arnott. Account management was led by Edi Walker, Nicole Grogg, Kristina Petersen, and Aline Litchenhaus, as documented by clapboard.com.
The creative decision to use Instagram as the distribution channel for the rolling GIFs was not incidental. The platform's format — infinite scroll, looping video, screenshot-native behaviour — made the raffle mechanic feel native rather than imposed. Participants were not asked to visit a microsite or fill in a form; they were asked to do something they already do instinctively, and in doing so they became distributors of the campaign across Switzerland's digital media landscape.
The "Antique GIFs" campaign produced a measurable outcome that matters most for an event-led brand: physical footfall from a new demographic. As reported by lbbonline.com and corroborated by marcommnews.com, the campaign generated online buzz that saw young visitors attend the Zurich Book Fair in record numbers. This result is structurally significant. The raffle mechanic required winners to collect their prints at the fair itself, creating a direct conversion path from Instagram participation to real-world attendance in Switzerland — a loop that most social campaigns fail to close.
No independently audited figures for total visitor numbers, social reach, or Instagram raffle entries are publicly available for this campaign. What the documented record confirms is a qualitative shift: a fair defined by an ageing audience demographic achieved record young visitor attendance in the same cycle as the campaign's launch. The 48 unique copperplate prints produced from the single print run served simultaneously as prizes, proof of craft, and collectible artefacts — objects with intrinsic value that extended the campaign's life beyond the fair's dates.
Clapboard.com awards "Antique GIFs" a Clapboard Score of 76 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual integration, genuine craft ambition, and an activation mechanic that converted digital engagement into physical attendance — areas where many cultural-sector campaigns fall short. The campaign's greatest structural strength is its reversibility of medium: it used a digital format to celebrate an analogue one, and an analogue object to justify a digital action, without either element feeling subordinate to the other.
"Antique GIFs" is a 2023 campaign by Serviceplan Suisse for the Zurich Book Fair in Switzerland. Five internet GIFs were recreated as hand-etched copperplate engravings, producing 48 unique prints raffled on Instagram to attract younger visitors to Switzerland's premier antiquarian book and print fair.
Swiss engraver Mathias Gentinetta created the copperplate work. Operating as Kupfer Werkstatt, Gentinetta hand-etched forty copper printing plates across five GIF sequences of eight frames each, bringing contemporary craft sensibility to a centuries-old analogue technique for the Zurich Book Fair campaign.
Participants screenshotted and reposted a rolling animated Antique GIF on Instagram for a chance to win a physical print of the frame they had captured. Winners collected their unique copperplate prints in person at the Zurich Book Fair, directly converting social participation into fair attendance in Switzerland.
According to lbbonline.com and marcommnews.com, the campaign generated online buzz that brought young visitors to the Zurich Book Fair in record numbers. No independently audited metrics are publicly available, but the documented outcome represents a measurable generational shift in attendance for the Switzerland-based fair.
Internet GIFs and copperplate printing share the same sequential frame-by-frame structure. Serviceplan Suisse used this formal parallel to give digital-native audiences an intuitive entry point into antiquarian craftsmanship, making the analogue technique feel legible rather than remote to younger Swiss audiences unfamiliar with the Zurich Book Fair.
The Antique GIFs campaign was published in February 2023, specifically on February 21, 2023, according to lbbonline.com. It was created by Serviceplan Suisse for the Zurich Book Fair and launched in Switzerland as an integrated campaign targeting younger audiences for the 2023 fair edition.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
